5/23/2006 @ 3:00PM

The Two-Hour Work-Life Balance Solution

In my book, Life 2.0, I wrote about professional refugees from the urban coasts–places such as Manhattan and Silicon Valley, with their obscenely high costs of living. I wrote about a couple from Silicon Valley, two engineers working at
Cisco Systems
. They traded their 800-square-foot Palo Alto, Calif., condo for two acres and a 5,200-square-foot farmhouse in Iowa. She had a baby and stopped working. He kept working, for Cisco, implausibly out there in the Iowa boonies, thanks to high-speed Internet and teleconferencing.

Take this job and move it. That was my message. To the farm, the mountains, the beach–yes, even the beach. One of my favorite stories in the book was of a couple who moved their high-tech public relations business from San Francisco to the Turks and Caicos Islands. In shorts and flip-flops, they service semiconductor clients from California, Taiwan and Singapore. Their business is booming.

Would you willing to pull up stakes for the Turks and Caicos? Id like to think that I could do that. My wife would probably shoot me dead before I got the last box on the boat. Shes a thoroughgoing California native, whereas Im a carpetbagger with no geographic loyalties. Sure, I like Northern California weather, but the cost of housing is too high, and I despise the newspapers and the politics. I could skip town in a heartbeat.

There is a another way, one I neglected in my book. Namely, keep your job in pricey Manhattan, L.A., S.F. or D.C. but move your residence two hours away, where real estate prices drop steeply from the core city and the inner plush suburbs and yet put you outside the clutch of those cheaper but soulless McMansion-filled exurbs.

Heres the obvious catch: Your move two hours away from your employer will bring only misery if you must go to work every day. The solution: Dont go to work every day.

Have an honest chat with your employer and yourself. Ask: How much office face time is really necessary for your job? For most of us, the answer lies somewhere between the extremes of 0% and 100%. For most of us, two or three days at the office will suffice for the week. If you think or sell for a living–perhaps the only two career options if you dont want your income arbitraged to the level of Shanghai or Bangalore–then two office days are certainly enough.

An entire five-day week of two-hour commutes would be living hell. But two days of it might be tolerable. Or maybe you can shave it to one day if you come in Tuesday morning, stay in town Tuesday night and depart for home Wednesday evening. The point is, office face-time is overrated. You want to be working and producing, and today you can work and produce from anywhere.

The two-hour-away option is yet another way of integrating work and life. It wont be as expensive as shelling out $2 million for your 1,200-square-foot loft in Tribeca. Nor will it be as isolating as Iowa or the Turks and Caicos. Two hours away is about right. A mere one hour away and youll find some, but not much, price relief: Outside of Manhattan, one hour away puts you in Rye, N.Y., Greenwich, Conn., or Far Hills, N.J., where your upper-middle-class dream house will cost you $2 million or more. But two hours away you’ll be in lovely Vernon, N.J., or Newburg, N.Y., or maybe far enough down the Jersey shore or far enough east near the tip of Long Island, where $2 million, or even $1 million, gets you something youd be proud to call home.

Here are the trends: Cities will get more expensive and crowded. Internet connections will get faster. Bosses will become more enlightened about telecommuting.